Robert Polito

Robert Polito is a poet, biographer, essayist, critic, educator, and arts administrator. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography in 1995 for Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. The founding director of the New School Graduate Writing Program in New York City, he was President of the Poetry Foundation from 2013-2015, before returning to the New School as a Professor of Writing.

Polito was born in Boston, MA on October 27, 1951. His father was supervisor of the Post Office in the historic South Station railroad station. Polito attended Boston College High School and Boston College, where he was Features Editor of the college newspaper, The Heights. He edited and designed the official Boston College literary journal, Stylus, as well as the alternative campus magazine, Wingwing. Columnist George Frazier, reviewing one of Polito's Stylus issues in the Boston Globe, wrote, "I happen to think it may well be the most sophisticated and subtle undergraduate literary magazine I have ever seen." He received his MA and Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard in 1981, with concentrations in the English Renaissance, Latin poetry, Romantic poetry, and modern poetry and fiction. His thesis, At the Titan's Breakfast: Three Essays on Byron's Poetry, was published in 1987 in the Garland-Routledge series, Harvard Dissertations in English and American Literature.

From 1983 to 1988 he wrote about literature and popular music for The Boston Phoenix, including articles about Elizabeth Bishop, Elvis Costello, Lou Reed, Jim Thompson, and the Turbines.

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